kill the lights
when i was roughly 8 years old, of my own volition i got really into learning german. if you tried to tell me this without showing me the journals i wouldn't believe you. paragraphs and paragraphs written daily, by me, im now unable to read. its a shame because im really into european edm now.
several journals, yearbooks, sketches, games, clothes sit in messy stacks around me, floor invisible.
i practiced on duolingo daily, but my only real memory of it is sitting in the living room of my grandmothers grandmothers grandmothers house in a hot south carolina summer, my family outside in the sweltering heat, curled up on the couch smugly playing the mini games thinking of how much smarter i was for staying inside.
on that morning, or maybe some other one, my father and i walked down the winding dirt road to my great grandmothers house. on our way there we encountered a turtle upside down, in the middle of the road. i thought to myself, how inconvenient, the middle of the road? darwin should have a word with you. foolish turtle. my dad found me a stick and asked me to turn it right side up. somehow the son of a bitch wasn't so slow and stupid anymore - the second i approached from the side to turn it upright it jumped toward me with it jaw, and i somehow jumped back 10ft further. my father couldn't stop laughing. i cursed in english first, german second.
in the stack of journals, there are roughly 8 completed books, spanning from age 10 to 17, before i migrated to digital sporadic message based documentation. the first journal, aged 11, begins with a why - people keep telling me things happened or things are a certain way that I don't recall, and i wanted a record of what exactly happened uncontaminated by memory or external perception. i dont claim they're lying but i can certainly imagine it being written that way. it ends with a depiction of my new cabinet organizing strategy. i need to digitize them but haven't had the time.
a year before that my family had left the cookie cutter suburbs for a very large but very incomplete boonies mcmansion custom built by a not yet divorced executive forced to put it up for an untimely sale by his "bitch exwife". he had clearly attempted to continue to do a lot of the work himself, as there were major electrical and plumbing failures that wouldn't pass in any decent contracting outfit, but my father smelt a deal and lept for it.
the heat failed regularly, and even after it was fixed it was set to only run at the minimum temperature to not freeze the pipes. it had no internet, and when that was fixed it was sub 1mpbs, which my father claimed dibs to as he worked from partially from home as a contractor. we ran the fireplace on chopped wood and sealed off the rest of the house, eating sleeping and living in the room with a fireplace. the green cot that was my bed is still in my closet.
despite all that i still preferred it to the town the house was close to. "town" might be giving it too much credit - wikipedia technically classifies it as an "unincorporated community", further - a hamlet. it was a corner store, a pizza place, a hardware store, a park, a school, and 3 churches, for 1000 people.
during the move i picked up a habit somehow of scratching my skin. i think, i scratch. im nervous, i scratch. i sleep, i scratch. there was no real intention behind it, it wasn't even really conscious, i'd compare it more to biting your nails or tapping your foot. it just happened. i was constantly looking for ways around this - picked up knitting to give my hands something to do, made a few small fidget toys, wore gloves all year round. alas
the knitting accumulated for a few years. i never made much more complicated than a pair of gloves. its probably a quarter of the shit i have piled all over my childhood bedroom. i could probably sell the excess of scarves - infinity scarves, oversized scarves, thin scarves, thick scarves. i only really made them for the sake of making them. i dont even like scarves. i dont even have that many people to reasonably give scarves too.
the school was tiny and extremely cliquey - can't blame them, they and their parents and their parents all grew up together. i had no real place in it. no idea what did it. at this point, the scarring from scratching hadn't become so blatantly obvious - looked like maybe acne, or mosquito bites to the untrained eye. i wasn't a particularly ugly child. i was a bit weird, maybe, but not enough to be isolating at my previous school. another girl took interest in me, and the scratching got worse. everyone always knew me before i knew them.
to make matters worse, everyone was getting into girl things or boy things. everything became about relationships and feelings and how other people perceived you and i was constantly in search of an acceptable way to participate in this without feeling like a skinwalker.
my new obsession became ruralese. my parents didn't know their friends, nor their parents their friends - they weren't even all from the same continent, and it wasn't an issue. they spoke the same language, sang the same songs, liked the same food and that patched up the differences. i studied them, spoke like them, sang like them, ate like them - and it worked. they spoke to me, sang with me, ate with me. the outsiders amongst them took comfort in the outsider in me, or enjoyed the novelty, or maybe something else entirely - yet the wires never actually connected.
thats not to say i wasn't the butt of the joke - looking like a twister mat from what everyone can see is very obviously your own scratching and knitting in class like a 74 year old dementia patient and your main interest being homestuck systems analysis of all things will do that. i thumb through my journals and can instantly find a good example - months after the move, trying to join a game at recess one girl telling me no one wants me there and her then being told to shut up immediately by the rest of the group.
i blamed myself and them in equal measures - certainly im just smarter than them and they can't see it, certainly if i try harder ill finally feel like i actually belong here and not like im either entirely above or entirely below my entire environment, certainly if i was just x or not y then that would fix it in their eyes.
there came a time where by all external measures it was fixed. high school was a bigger world. i could get by by floating between different friend groups, i got invited to parties, i always had friday night plans, yet it only intensified the feeling of being an outsider.
im struck with a memory, gym class. my lungs burning, sweat plastered across my face, my legs on fire.. i remember thinking it was stupid, knowing it was stupid, knowing no one else was trying - but as i entered the court for the second round of bullshit pinterest gym activity ball, the class tryhard who was on my team last round called me weak, and it set off a rage in me. he was right and i knew it and i knew i could do nothing about it other than try and fall short anyway.
i finally traded in the scratching for becoming a human mechatronics operator. the essence that is me climbs into the thing people call me, the physical form associated with that thing, and does the me-things, while i am free to remain elsewhere. i was asuka langely, i was an actor in the worlds most elaborate improv set, i was the worlds greatest showman. i don't think i woke up one day and said "ah yes, my robot, my meat mech, my very much not my body that i happen to control" - it came to me like walking comes to a baby.
i look at my last ever yearbook photo before covid - 10th grade. long messy hair, endearing rodent like smile, unsubtle brown eyeliner, a white on-sale button down hollister top. she's girl next door attractive, if you're drunk or high. i check the date and cross reference it against the journal entry for that day - all of which included a song of the day - this one was lost it to trying by son lux.
i take a second to read her hopes, her dreams, her prayers. beneath it all, contempt. every night without fail there was a scheming to escape, a search for a better place, a new future where the wires somehow connect. she attempts to contort herself into the highest probability of escape shape first, and the highest probability of acceptance second.
escape to where? big city, university, different boonies on a horse with no name as an adult instead of a weird little kid. i was a superstar academic with a billion papers or a cowboy on a horse with no name or work hard play hard never sober raver. i was a gamer chud i was a corporate sell out i was a vagabond reject.
she'd pack up her stuff at dawn, leave a small note, and ride off into the sunrise on a horse, or train, or plane. arriving at her destination she'd go to a communal gathering place like a party or a class or a lunch. she'd work hard, she'd learn the vagabondian or academican or partier slang and ways. they love her, she's good at it, and she's escaped the small town onto better pastures.
just to eat the same grass.